Drive mass adoption for AI to be an everyday tool

Alvin Toffler wrote in the Third Wave about human social evolution – agriculture, industry and technology. In agriculture, mechanisation was the game-changer in large scale food production. Industrialisation addressed its many shortcomings such as food storage and processing at industrial and household levels.

The advent of industry brought about many things including electricity, air travel, large scale manufacturing and the printing press that revolutionised the publishing and the media industry, and many other conveniences. The trend has been clear, one evolution upgrades the shortcomings of whatever came before.

Technology is the one aspect that has morphed into transformational facets unimaginable at its onset. The Internet has seen no bounds in its evolution. It brought with it the Internet of Things – the ubiquitous connectivity that allows governments, entrepreneurs and individuals to transform major sectors – health, education, agriculture, manufacturing et cetera.

Along comes Artificial Intelligence (AI). At the just concluded Connected Africa Summit 2024, a Pan African information, communication and technology conference that brought together over 5,000 delegates including African Heads of States, ICT ministers, ICT industry players, high level government officials, businesses, academia, global investors, development partners and international organisations, this was the biggest topic.

Not since the advent of the Internet has the technology industry come up with a more transformative development that would be a general-purpose tool like electricity which revolutionised how people live everywhere – use of ovens, fridges, microwaves, iron boxes in homes to name but a few. So, while nearly 40 per cent of African populations are still not connected to national grids, they have access to various forms of energy such as solar systems that mainstream them onto the formal and informal economy.

Experts say AI will become ubiquitous and everyday tool, meaning that governments need to start thinking about how to accelerate its mass adoption.

AI is set to help small- and medium-sized business thrive with innovations driving simple but life-changing day-to-day services. Examples are the handheld AI-enabled ultrasound gadgets for use by pregnant women individually or through community health workers instead of visiting the clinic; using machine learning to predict things like pest invasion (like the locust and fall army worm menace); AI will drive financial payments like mobile money or identity systems for security and data protection purposes.

The big challenge is mustering the financial resources required to build the infrastructure necessary for its mass rollout — such as renewable energy to power data centres, the technology itself and the human capital to manage it — AI-skilling and digital skills programmes.

Kenya has had a headstart with several large tech firms well suited to take advantage of the country’s strategic geo-location as landing site for six undersea cables.

The government is currently laying 100,000km of fibre optic cablingacross the country and starting over 1,450 village digital hubs that will backstop the many digital skilling programmes by the private sector.

Rwanda’s ICT and Innovation Minister, Paula Ingabire compared the advent of AI as the Industrial Revolution 4.0. “ We have to leap over the stages and play at the top of the game. We have to seize the moment, exploit our synergies and ride the crest of the wave.”

Dr Monique Nsanzabaganwa, Deputy Chairperson of the Africa Union Commission urged African governments to take advantage of the Africa Free Trade Cooperation Area to optimise on existing comparative advantage of each nation’s progress in the digital space to harness the power of AI.

Wan Wei, Huawei’s Regional Vice President for Public Affairs, called on governments to improve rural connectivity to ensure full digital inclusion. While acknowledging the prohibitive cost of deploying telecom infrastructure to rural areas, he said rural areas needed to be transformed into smart villages.

These must become AI-ready by ensuring proper legal frameworks that support last-mile fiber through micro-trenching, use of electricity poles, fiber in houses and buildings, sharing of infrastructure and expansion of 5G coverage to harness the power of networks, cloud and applications.

- Mr Matiba works in the Technology industry. He spoke as one of the resources on Smart Villages at the Connected Africa Summit.